Back in the days of The Kansas City Star’s rapid and successful expansion into Johnson County — operating a big bureau on College Boulevard and publishing more than a dozen “neighborhood news” sections — the assistant managing editor for Johnson County used to say “the center of gravity” of Kansas City area journalism was shifting from downtown Kansas City to the southwestern suburbs.

That was in the early 2000s. And the editor, now-retired Michael “O.J.” Nelson couldn’t have been more wrong. By the late 2000s, the big bureau on College Boulevard was closed, along with all the other suburban bureaus; the far-flung neighborhood news operation had been disassembled; and scores of editorial employees had been bought out or laid off.

The plunge of print was — and continues to be — a humbling experience for The Star and most other major metropolitan dailies.

The center of gravity did, indeed, shift. But instead of revolving around the growth of the suburbs, it had to do with the shift away from print journalism and toward digital and other electronic formats.

…If ever there was an in-your-face-sign of how that shift is playing out locally, it occurred yesterday when KCUR-FM, the local public radio station, came out with a blockbuster story revealing that the highest-paid state employee in Kansas, KU basketball coach Bill Self, and perhaps the second-highest paid employee, KU football coach David Beatty, do not pay state income taxes on the bulk of their income because of the disastrous 2012 tax cuts in Kansas.

The reason is Self and Beatty receive the bulk of their incomes through limited liability corporations (LLC’s) they have created. LLC’s were among the many categories of “businesses” — along with partnerships, sole proprietorships and independent contractors, among others — that got a pass on state income taxes as a result of the 2012 tax-cut law.

The KCUR story says:

Before Gov. Sam Brownback signed the tax cuts, the top tax bracket was 6.45 percent. At that rate, Self would have owed up to $177,375 annually in Kansas income taxes. Even under the current reduced top rate of 4.6 percent, he’d have owed up to $126,500.

Under his contract with KU, Self receives a salary of $230,000 a year. But he gets at least another $2.75 million — channeled to the LLC — for “educational, public relations and promotional duties as assigned by the athletics director.”

The significance of the story is that, in the most dramatic way imaginable, it explodes the myth that the Brownback tax cuts were designed to create jobs. Like hundreds of thousands of others who benefited from the tax cuts, Bill Self and David Beatty do not create jobs; they just accumulate oodles of money in their various bank, trust and “wealth management” accounts.

…The story was a pure and breath-taking scoop for KCUR, which has quietly been assembling a powerhouse team of reporters and editors in recent years.

Margolies

Adding to the indignity for The Star, the lead reporter on the KCUR story is none other than former KC Star business reporter Dan Margolies, who left The Star in 2009 to take a media job on the East Coast but returned a year later after that job didn’t work out. Margolies joined KCUR two years ago as Heartland Health Monitor editor, but his reporting goes well beyond health care. The other reporter on the story is Sam Zeff, who covered health and education for KCPT-TV before joining KCUR in August 2014.

On Steve Kraske’s “Up to Date” radio show this morning, Zeff said he was watching a Royals game on TV when he was reviewing the nuances of the tax-cut law and suddenly realized Self’s LLC income was exempt from state income taxes. He and Margolies ran with it from there.

Zeff

Another former KC Star staffer now with KCUR is Donna Vestal, KCUR’s director of content strategy. In addition, Kevin Collison, The Star’s former development reporter, is freelancing for the station. And, of course, Kraske now divides his time between KCUR and The Star, as well as teaching at UMKC.

Shortly after Margolies accepted the job at KCUR in 2014, I wrote a post about him. When I asked how he felt about getting back into journalism in Kansas City, he replied, in part: “Here we have a news organization, KCUR, that not only is not shrinking but is expanding its news operation. That appealed to me.”

Two years later, it continues to expand — while The Star keeps shrinking. Ah, that center of gravity…yes, it is shifting.

And as the large dailies lose advertising to electronic media, staff size drops, and local news coverage suffers. This leaves a void for broadcast media and electronic media to fill – if they will. Another option may be local community based media – print or electronic – such as the Banyan Project in Massachusetts.

I could be wrong but I don’t think the Banyan Project is operating out of Massachusetts. The founder is Tom Stites, a former editor at The New York Times and The Kansas City Times. I was under the impression Tom is still here in Kansas City.

At any rate, here’s what the project’s website says about its mission:

“As the Internet blossoms newspapers are withering, and the reliable news coverage and information that communities need for their civic health are withering with them. New models for community journalism that can thrive in the digital future are an urgent need of our democracy, and the nonprofit Banyan Project is responding. Its mission is to help seed independent community news cooperatives, then support them with mentorship and educational and administrative tools.”

Tom Stites moved to Massachusetts several years ago to operate Communications and publications for the Unitarian Universalist Association.
(Inclcuded UU World Magazine, Beacon Press & Skinner House Publishing)
Subsequent to retirement from that his focus is the Banyon Project which to date has nothing happening in KC that I’m aware of.

You are right, Mike Hendricks. But I’m talking about when Margolies, while a reporter at the Kansas City Business Journal, got hold of the Star’s annual financial results and published them on the BJ’s front page. This was in about 1992. The Star was part of Capital Cities Communications Inc. then, and the financial results of the company’s individual newspapers were top secret. Someone at the Star left the financial info at a copy machine, and the info mysteriously found its way to Margolies. The numbers demonstrated that the Star was kicking ass, and Hale was actually pleased when Dan called him to confirm the information. I think it’s high time for the person who sent the financials to Margolies to step forward and claim the credit.

This excellent story by Margolies and Zeff is a major indictment on The Star which used to publish insightful stories like this one routinely. Today, with the newsroom only a fraction of what it was a decade ago, such stories are rarely found in The Star, which is so thin it reminds me of the old Saturday afternoon Star. The Star seems to only do great work when it’s in the aftermath of a tragedy _ Brandon Ellison drowning, KC firefighter deaths_ or a natural disaster like the Joplin tornado. But the gutting of staff over the past 8 years has resulted in a tremendous dearth of beat reporting and enterprise stories, like this one, which can only come from seasoned veteran reporters who have the time, knowledge and support from superiors to do such a story.

By the way, was the “center of gravity” remark by the editor you mentioned above made in jest? Or was he serious? If the latter, I wonder what his boss Art Brisbane would have thought about that. I think I recall a lot of editorials under Brisbane’s leadership calling for the revitalization of downtown. And he later pushed his bosses at Knight Ridder to build a shiny new production facility not in Johnson County but rather downtown.

Brisbane was publisher at that time, and, yes, he was an advocate of downtown revitalization and central city coverage. At the same time, though, the suburbs were growing wildly, and circulation was spiking in those areas. Everyone, including Brisbane, realized it was a great market to tap. In about 2004, Mac Tully, a Johnson Countian, succeeded Brisbane, and for the next few years he put a premium on Johnson County coverage — whether it was warranted it or not. (It wasn’t.) Everything fell apart in 2008, the year Tully left — but not because he left. By that time, it was clear newspapers had greatly underestimated the Internet and the Internet was eating print’s lunch.

The real story isn’t that some one is doing this. The real story is that rich people grabbed power and created laws allowing this to be done. It’s been done at the state and national level. But the news agencies & editors let it happen by not pursuing the story. Could it be because the wealthy that exploit such loopholes own the press?